


Busted

by tawg



Series: We Build and We Break [2]
Category: Hot Fuzz (2007)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-19
Updated: 2011-06-19
Packaged: 2017-10-20 13:33:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/213304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony doesn’t have the strength to hope that things will get better. He’s not strong enough for a lot of things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Busted

There’s no real schedule to anything anymore. If something needs to be done, it’s done. If an officer is needed somewhere, they go. Mouths open and close without a single word of meaning passing over crooked bottom teeth, and the Sandford Police stand there and soak them up; guilt and shame stripping them of words of their own. But then, words are rarely just words.

Somerfield has been pillaged beyond any shred of decency, and that’s perhaps the one thing that Nicholas is willing to let go. “They’re hungry,” he’d said to the questioning gazes that fell to him as they stood in the car park, shifting feet crunching on glass that was broken by their own hands, their own fingerprints being crushed to dust beneath shoes that are wearing out on the streets. Sandford is starving, shrivelling and curling in on itself. None of them like it, like the way the clouds hang lower and the villagers stare past them in the dim streets. But Tony understands the hunger, the desire to clamp a leech-mouth onto some kind of order, to yell and curse when it’s finally sucked dry. Sometimes keeping the peace is about letting rules be broken. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and a harder one to give up once the taste of it is in you.

There have been no starts or ends to shifts since the station became a firework that became a hole that is now straining against its bonds in an effort to become symbolism. Just times when people are awake, and times when they’re not. Tony has never been so wide awake to the world around him. So wide awake that his eyes are burning and his limbs are heavy and there is not a single circuit or cell within him that’s working the way it should. The sluggish dynamo inside him puttering and stuttering, just the burn of a constantly staggering and wavering direct current. Not even a fluid fuel to build up at the corners of his eyes and leak down through the lines on his face. Just the constant rotating windings and the carsick feeling of going nowhere.

 

Tony drinks cheap, bitter coffee while he waits for Nicholas to finish up in Danny’s room. The only sure elements left, perhaps. Whenever Nicholas isn’t on the streets, or isn’t on the phone with his back turned towards Doris and the Andes, or isn’t somehow finding a way to make things not-quite fine, but a little closer to bearable-; he’s somehow in that painful chair beside an even more painful bed, with Danny lying on it being painfully still. And Tony is outside in a physically identical chair that is painful for a completely separate set of reasons, reasons that overlap in the most delicate and unspoken of Venn diagrams.

Tony hates the visiting. Talking a little too brightly, a little too strained. So he doesn’t. But things have changed in a way that’s all about them being the same when they should be better, about eyes being opened at last and clogging up with the dust and grit and bitterness, and now he has no craved and lying words of optimism. If Danny ever wakes up, Tony will have nothing for the boy (the boy who can only be a few years younger than Angel, so what does that make of their damning saviour-sergeant?). Nothing but averted gazes that are insincere apologies.

He tries not to think of Danny – tries not to think of Frank, or the NWA, or his wife and son. All missing in action. They form a dull buzz in the back of his brain, growing fainter and more settled with each passing day until – hopefully, hope that’s desperate in a way that only the drowning can understand – they will have burrowed in entirely and Tony will no longer wake with the sickening disorientation of thinking that everything is still fine, of morning after morning of crashing back down into the jagged earth of reality as he stares at the naked bumps of Nicholas’ spine showing through the pale skin below his shoulder blades.

Tony doesn’t ask about the name Nicholas murmurs sometimes in his sleep, doesn’t ask about the girl no one knows anything about. It’s a predictable story that he doesn’t particularly need to hear and, like most stories, one Nicholas doesn’t want to tell. Harder to ignore is the name that worms its way past gritted teeth and over swollen lips in the hazy sweaty break between wakefulness and a time when they both pretend to have fallen asleep. It has some of the same letters as Tony’s own name, and he fights against some traitorous choking organ inside him, trying to believe that it’s enough.

He tries not to think about Nicholas at all, if he can manage it. He knows that it’s a dangerous path to follow, to indulge in flushes under skin that are felt rather than seen, in the dim grey shapes moving awkwardly and guiltily across his marital bed, with the lights (always) out. He tries to repress the echoes of whimpers that were pressed against the old skin of his own neck, of the feel of his own blunt fingernails gripping and digging into the peach-like flesh of a buttock, pulling and pressing and sweat and saliva gluing them together for short moments, leaving them slick enough to fall apart and pretend – despite the clothes tangled in sheets and their own harsh breaths in the humid aftermath – that nothing had happened, that they were doing nothing wrong.

It’s not sex. Not yet.

All that’s left for him to think about is the one issue that presses itself forwards more insistently every passing minute, every minute that doesn’t pass but drags, finally manifesting in a sore shoulder from where Andrew had grabbed him a subjective week before, dragging Tony down one dishwater-grey hallway after another.

“I know what you two are doing,” he’d said. And Tony was a little surprised. Even he didn’t know what they were doing. Andrew shoved him into an empty room and followed after, a rage of agitation with a stubbed out cigarette tucked behind one ear. He faced Tony down, hands on hips, then crossed over his chest, and then toying with jacket pockets. Fidgeting and guiltily alive with the sick feeling of anger and shame and a demanding curiosity.

Tony looked at Andrew with tired eyes, seeing nothing but tired eyes staring back at him. His mind was blank and buzzing; he shrugged.

Andrew ran long fingers through a sullen fringe. “You ain’t thinking, are you? You’re too busy being shell-shocked like the rest of us want to be. And I get that, okay? I really do. But you need to start using your head.”

Tony blinked. And then blinked again, revelling in the split-second darkness that cut him off and left him alone, the creaking cogs inside his skull grinding and whining in protest. His voice wasn’t soft from shame or cracked with emotion, just flat and quiet from lack of use. “What are you talking about?”

Andrew leaned close, pulling Tony closer by the same abused shoulder. “Sandford’s fucked, yeah? And so’re we. The Police department’s rooted without an inspector to hold it together.”

Tony shrugged, the same sullen expression he’d nursed since puberty, the same curl of the lip that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to use since the entirety of his body was weighted down with a starving self-imposed condemnation. “We’ll get a new inspector eventually.”

“Yeah,” Andrew said impatiently. “And the fuck you think it’s going to be?”

The words sunk like bodies into mud, heavy and breathless. Tony staggered a little, and seeing the reaction Andrew pushed on. “There’s a list with only two names on it, Tony. You’re one of them, and Angel’s the other.”

Tony’s mouth worked awkwardly, floundering at the realisation that there were no words to be put in it, that there was nothing mindless and noncommittal sitting reflex-ready at the place where his brain ended and his lungs began – both of which were tied up, both of which were dying a little more each passing day, so much more with every second. And all the while Andrew was still staring at him, that firm intense look that Angel hadn’t seemed capable of giving anyone of late, had run out of.

“I can’t be inspector,” he said at last.

“No shit,” Andrew replied, pulling the cigarette from behind his ear, neatening the end between fine-fidgeting-careless fingers, and then returning it. “And the state Angel’s in, he ain’t going to be a great candidate either.”

“I can’t be inspector,” Tony repeated, having latched on to one element of the conversation, and refusing to let go. Straw to a drowning man, and each time he opened his mouth more and more cold water poured in and turned his joints to ice, dragging him down. “I can’t…”

“What you’ve got to do,” Andrew ground out from between stern teeth, grinding the bones in Tony’s shoulders together with the first grip that meant anything in a long time. “You’ve got to... Angel needs to man the fuck up, right? And he ain’t going to do it if he’s...” Andrew trailed off and looked away, not wanting to put words to his thoughts, to bind Nicholas and Tony to those solid suspicions and yet tying them down all the same. Hands behind backs and lines across chests and each denying struggle against the bonds just leads to more of the biting burn of rope against skin.

Tony had pulled away, his face twisting out of an allegiance he hadn’t known he’d held seconds before. Loyal but uncertain, like thousands of conspirators before him. Because Andrew’s words made a tempting amount of sense. Because Angel had been all they’d had for so long that Tony was beginning to forget ever having someone else to lean on. “He deserves better,” he said at last to the dirty cream floors.

“Yeah,” Andrew had agreed. “Just like Danny deserves better than lying good-as-dead in a hospital bed with bits of his organs halfway across Sandford. Policing ain’t about what people _deserve_ , Tony.”

Tony had never given Danny more than an absent consideration – like a table, or a dog, or the son of a boss. He has no idea what Danny would think of the situation, no idea as to the severity of the hurt look on his face or the emotional destination of the roadmap of wrinkles across his brow. But he can picture it, and those imagined hurt brown eyes will be staring at him from behind closed eyelids for a long time. Nicholas, on the other hand, has his heart unwittingly laid out across crisp white hospital sheets and hands that never quite touch Danny’s own. He doesn’t speak because he doesn’t have to; because not owning up is a sumptuous smothering addiction that he’s come to late in life. And words mean so little these days, anyway.

So Tony waits outside the hospital room. He sips his coffee - ignoring the way it scalds his tongue, ignoring the way he feels like he deserves it - and spends a lifetime in a lonely linoleum hallway waiting for Nicholas to let go, just enough.

Waiting for enough (bile and anger and coffee and) strength to fill him so that he can let go first.


End file.
